Wednesday, March 17, 2010

WIP Jump Pack Captain

note: This guy has been primed and painted already, but I wanted to show a WIP shot.

As I've become obsessed with Planetstrike games, I decided that I needed a Captain equipped with a Jump Pack to better support my assault/counter assault elements (both my 2000 points defender/attacker lists now have Jump Pack Marines). I didn't want to spend a million points on him, so I gave him the basics: Jump Pack, Power Weapon and a Melta Bomb.

Some very minor conversions went into this guy: I cut down the hip plates from a Terminator Assault set and had to place a spacer on his Jump pack to fit in the Iron Halo. If I do the hip plates again (and I will as I kind of like them!), I'll probably fit in some sort of spacer to lift them up slightly from the armor. They look a bit off...or that could just be me.

I heavily decorated the Jump Pack as I wanted the Captain to be able to fit in with the bling-laden Vanguard and still stand out. I think the seals and base will help in that regard. The base I received in a trade via Santa Cruz Warhammer Barter Bucket. I traded my OOP Imperial Guard along with an Imperial Guard on a bike for metal scouts, and Mike was awesome enough to toss in a few resin bases. It adds a great amount of height to the Captain and will be fun to paint I think.

I'm pretty sure the seals were from the Ravenwing set. I love that set just for the seals! On the top of the jump pack, I wanted to add some more bling (pimp my jump pack!), so I shaved down a pair of matching Terminator honors bits as far as I could manage and glued them on. If I had more skill (and time) to work with green stuff, I'd probably had been better served going that route. But I'm happy with the way it turned out.

I wish my pics weren't so dark. Taking pics while working isn't easy. Do you folks have a photobox set up that is quick to turnaround? Often, I'm snapping a pic under a lamp and trying my best to clean it up on Photoshop (my skills there a limited as well). My challenge is that I live in a NYC apartment that has nearly no space to permanently set up a photobox/lamp set up...so I make do with my work lamp on the coffee table so I can get something up. Perhaps it's a setting on the camera I can fiddle with...is there any setting that'll take brighter pictures despite crappy lighting?

4 comments:

Looking good! I like how you've tricked out the jump pack, it turned out rather cool. As far as picture taking goes, I always try to include a plain white piece of paper somewhere in the background to color/white-balance against in post-production. I'm definitely no expert, but that seems to help a bit for dark pictures... Looking forward to seeing him painted up - I've faltered a bit on painting my Crimson Fists, it's time to get pack to the painting table!

He looks sweet dude - the only thing I'd have suggested would be magnetize the arms. A pair of lightning claw arms and you have a counts as Shrike. Plus shouldn't a CF captain have a PF for fluff/coolness ;)